American Chemical Society Dives Deeper Into Open Access With The Debut of ACS Omega

The American Chemical Society will push further into open access publishing in 2016 with the launch of ACS Omega, a pay-to-publish, free-to-read multidisciplinary journal.

The peer-reviewed journal is the society’s second fully open access title. ACS Central Science, a highly selective, multidisciplinary journal launched in 2015, is free to both authors and readers. ACS also offers authors the ability to pay fees to make their articles in the society’s other, subscription-based journals freely available as open access.

Unlike ACS’s other journals, however, ACS Omega will not count the perceived impact or significance of the results in a submitted manuscript among its publication criteria. Publication decisions will be based solely on whether the science in the submitted article is technically sound, says Penelope Lewis, director of editorial development of the ACS journals publishing division.

“ACS Omega will have the same rigorous scientific standards and rapid publication times that ACS journals are known for,” Lewis adds. Work published in the new, fully open access journal will be immediately available to the scientific community and the general public.  

“We expect submissions from across the globe and across all areas of chemical science and allied fields,” Lewis says. To cope with the wide disciplinary scope and sheer scale of submissions expected, ACS Omega will have four coeditors at its helm. A committee of active researchers from around the world has been convened to lead the search for those editors, who will be based in China, India, Europe, and the Americas.  

Authors wishing to have their work published in ACS Omega will be able to take advantage of the society’s process for transferring manuscripts (including reviewer comments) between ACS journals. The process, which debuted in pilot form earlier this year and is now available across all ACS journals, allows authors to seamlessly transfer a manuscript rejected from one ACS journal for consideration by another. 

ACS Omega expects to begin welcoming submissions in the spring of 2016; the first articles will be published in summer of 2016. Article publication charges for ACS Omega have not yet been finalized but “are expected to be competitive,” Lewis notes.